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01/07/2003 "Terrorists or Freedom Fighters?"

Terrorist or Freedom Fighters? by Dr. Steven Best and Anthony J. Nocella

In the 1980, a new radical environmental group ‚ Earth First! -- was formed out of frustration with trying to preserve the environment through normal political channels. Once a Washington lobbyist, co-founder Dave Foreman realized that Congress was inherently pro-corporate and corrupt, and thereby unwilling and unable to pass the legislation needed to prevent ecological collapse.

Inspired by Edward Abbey's book, The Monkeywrench Gang, which features a motley band of environmentalists who fight their cause with explosives, Foreman and others created Earth First! and adopted “monkeywrenching” and “ecotage” as militant new tactics of struggle that by-passed the political system for powerful means of direct action.

During the 19th century, industrial workers grew so frustrated and weary from capitalist exploitation that they began acts of “sabotage” (“sabot” is the French term for “shoe”) and “monkeywrenching” literally by throwing shoes and wrenches into the capitalist's machines to grant themselves a respite from incessant toil.

Redefined in today's environmental context, sabotage becomes ecotage and monkeywrenching involves attacks on the machines and property of industries slaughtering animals and raping the natural world for profit, without targeting any culpable individuals.

Common Earth First! tactics include pulling up survey stakes, spiking trees to make it dangerous to cut them (using clearly marked spray-painted circles to avoid injury to workers), pouring sugar or other harmful materials into the gas tanks of bulldozers, and chaining activists to equipment or trees.

It is important to emphasize that while Dave Foreman has been physically attacked, Judi Barr was seriously injured by a bomb that exploded in her car, and countless activists have been threatened and roughed-up, no Earth First! actions have harmed human beings, only the property of those who destroy the earth.

The Earth First! ecotage model was quickly adopted by a myriad of environment and animal rights groups around the world that fought against capitalist domination. In the 1990s, a powerful new direct action group emerged to fight for animal rights, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

Inspired by the Earth First! ecotage approach and the anarchist model of political organization, the ALF is an underground, decentralized group dispersed across the entire nation. There is no “leader” to capture in order to decapitate the movement, only a host of individuals and cells that spread rhizomatically.

This complex structure defies government infiltration and disruption, and thereby thwarts the kind of success the U.S. government had in its infiltration of the Black Panthers, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, and numerous other groups.

The goal of the ALF is to liberate as many animals as possible from the sundry forms of confinement, oppression, and killing. Following the nonviolent philosophy of Gandhi and the U.S. civil rights movement, the ALF believes that there is a higher law that than created by and for the corporate-state entity a moral law that transcends the corrupt and biased laws of the U.S. political system -- the best system that money can buy.

When the law is wrong, the right thing to do is to break it. This is how moral progress is made in history, from defiance of American slavery to disobedience of Hitler's anti-Semitism to sit-ins at “whites only” lunch counters in Alabama.

Thoreau's maxim that one ought to obey only one's own conscience, and never the law, is a good start toward critical thinking and autonomy, but it can also provide a formula for a dangerous fanaticism that turns violent, such as with the militant anti-abortion people who kill for their cause.

Thus, it important that the ALF and other direct action groups are guided by the belief that however righteous their anger, no human being ever be harmed in the struggle for liberation of others; rather, only property is damaged as a necessary means to the end of animal or earth liberation.

When the success of ALF tactics rang throughout the land of radical peace and justice activists, many "fronts" were formed, including the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), an organization dedicated to, among other things, burning down ski lodges and destroying new housing complexes, and so on, earning them the badge of “terrorists” by the FBI.

This is the first book to attempt a philosophical support of the ALF. Some of the writers are academics, some are activists, and some are both. Some belong to the ALF or have been members in the past.

Some speak out from within the classroom, and some agitated from inside their prison walls. We all have different perspectives, but we speak in one voice in our support for the controversial tactics and goals of the ALF.

None of us apologize for the tactics of direct action and civil disobedience, and all of us renounce, repudiate, and revile animal exploitation industries and the bloody stain they leave on this planet.

But we do not here advocate property destruction, vandalism, break-ins, and, of course, violence. We seek to begin a dialogue of what people can and should do in a world where animals are so severely oppressed and tortured, and where the law serves to protect a few exploiters rather than the billions of exploited.

The book provides background documents on the history and formation of the ALF, descriptions of some of their actions, and defenses of their rationale and agenda. We seek to dispel a number of misconceptions. It should be clear that the ALF is supported not only by “naïve” or “confused” young people, but also by experienced activists and serious academics.

Additionally, we emphasize that members of the ALF are not hateful people, but are loving people who cherish all life, which explains why they cannot tolerate violence to animals and will go to extraordinary lengths to stop extraordinary wrongs.

In this book you will find people defending property destruction, but you will not find anyone supporting violence against any life. You will discover a group of people supporting the struggle to free nonhuman species whose oppression has reached intolerable levels in an era of advanced technology and mass production and killing.

Property destruction, when it occurs at all, is never an end in itself, but only a means to the end of justice and animal liberation.

Despite our the governmental blowback toward civil liberties and rights, it urgent that we focus on the question of why animal liberation is ethically defensible, and why the ALF should be considered among the great liberation movements of recent history.

The ALF mission is not to be “radical” or “extremist,” it is only to liberate oppressed animals. Only when enough people join together in an animal rights movement and in nonviolently liberating animals can the shrieks and screams of our fellow species cease.

Just as the civil rights movement had innumerable daily actions of mass civil disobedience, animal activists too have to multiply resistance and liberation activities throughout the nation and on a continuous basis. And just like the brave activists of the civil rights movement, when we are released from jail, we must go back and liberate more animals, until all are free.

It is important that we provisionally define some key terms, beginning with “violence.” Strictly defined, “violence” is an act of one individual or group against another individual or group that inflicts physical harm on their bodies, possibly causing death.

Some definitions of violence include the causing of emotional or psychological harm to other human beings, such as in a situation of domestic abuse. But any valid definition of violence would have to include the obscene suffering human animals as a species inflict on nonhuman animals for the most trivial of reasons.

Nonhuman animals are the victims of the violence of the human species, and human beings can be the perpetuators of violence on other sentient beings. We believe, however, that the broadening of the term “violence” to include property, store windows, buildings, and assorted physical objects is without justification and trivializes the violence done to human and nonhuman animals.

Depending on the motivation and act, one might call intentional damage done to property vandalism, defacement, or theft, but not “violence.”

Thus we do not buy into the facile argument that when the ALF spray paints a wall, smashes computers, or wrecks a laboratory, this is “violence.” For purposes of animal liberation, it is not even vandalism, but merely destruction for a just cause, such that the means do justify the ends.

Similarly, when the ALF takes animals out of a fur farm or experimental laboratory, we do not consider this “stealing” animals, for they were never anyone's rightful property to begin with, but rather “liberating” them from their tormentors in order that they may enjoy the existence that is theirs to live.

The majority of ALF actions involve defacing laboratories, destroying equipment, and liberating animals, and avoid use of explosive and arson, both of which are uncontrollable and could harm to humans or animals. In our Orwellian world, it is difficult to find truth and logic.

It is not the ALF's tactics that are questionable, but rather the animal exploitation industries that exploit animals so viciously, and the legal system that callously provides its imprimatur.

The actions of the ALF are just; they seek to remedy a horrific wrong done to animals. When the industries have so much economic and political power, when the government shuts out the voices of reason and compassion, when the legal system is tailored for a daily holocaust of animals, animal liberationists often have no choice but to bypass the law and serve a higher justice.

Without breaking laws in the name of the higher justice, numerous historical injustices to people would not have been corrected, and we see no reason why it should be any different for animals.

Finally, we cannot accept the current mode of demonizing animal rights activists and liberationists. In the post 9-11 hysteria where all kinds of civil rights are under attack, it is no longer adequate to deride those who fight for animals as “wackos” or “extremists,” it is now de rigueur to brand them as “terrorists,” specifically, “domestic terrorists,” and consider them a threat to “national security”!

This discourse would be amusing if it weren't so serious, for it legitimates the unleashing of the state surveillance and repression apparatus on animal rights activists and supporters. We insist that “terrorism” mean not the destruction or theft of “property” in order to secure the ethically justified end of liberating animals from their traps, cages, and torture racks, but the infliction of violence against innocent human beings for nefarious political purposes.

Indeed, if any definitional expansion is in order, it is to include in the concept of violence and terrorism those humans ‚ namely the vast majority of our species -- who maim, mutilate, vivisect, and slaughter animals for profit, or who indirectly perpetuate these heinous acts through ignorant choices such as wearing fur or eating meat and dairy products.

Thus, toward animals, the vast majority of our species are “terrorists,” and it is for good reason that Isaac Bashevis Singer said, ”In their relation to animals, all humans are Nazis.”

One of the central ironies of our time is that within the exploitative and materialist ethos of capitalism, property and inanimate objects have become more sacred than life, such that to destroy life is legal and (to all-too many) ethical acceptable, while to destroy things is illegal, immoral, and even an act of “terrorism.”

ALF actions are done less out of hatred for animal oppressors than for love for life, and their actions are motivated by empathic identification with the needless and wantonly cruel suffering humans inflict on animals.

Read more of this Best book here.........................

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